Sender and receiver

I work with a fairly broad term: communication. Today the field is larger than it has ever been.

What once was mainly about contact with newsrooms now takes in internal communication, media pitching, search, visibility in the answers artificial intelligence gives, content, crisis handling, sales and the entire customer journey. The boundaries between the disciplines have moved, and they are still moving.

That makes the work harder to bound, and all the more important to prioritise correctly.

Success is not about what others have done

It is about what you can do.

Case studies from other companies are interesting to read and rarely possible to copy. What decides things is your situation: which market you are in, which people you have, what the bottleneck actually is, and what you can realistically carry out alongside everything else that has to be done.

That is why I never start with a recommendation. I start with a question.

One task, not fifteen

Together we work out what your biggest and most important communication task is.

Not a list of everything that could be done — anyone can make one of those, and it just sits there. One task, the one that matters most right now, and that it is possible to get started on. My experience is that the way from plan to action is shorter than people think, and that what stops the work is usually that someone tried too much at once.

No obligations

One meeting can easily become many, or the only one we have.

Either is fine. I will say honestly if I think you do not need me, or that someone else is a better fit for that particular task. That is cheaper for both of us than an assignment that should never have started.

And since the rest of this site says “we”: Desken is me, and a network of people I have worked with for many years — journalists, designers, developers — who are brought in when the job calls for it. But the first conversation is with me.

Sender and receiver

Yes, it is you and it is me.

The whole discipline rests on that one model: someone sends, someone receives, and everything that matters happens in the distance between them. That applies here too. You are reading this, I wrote it, and the only thing left is whether anything got through.

Shall we grab a coffee?

Knut Magne Whist
Managing director and adviser, Desken AS · Oslo